On bravery and Uncle Max

Not everyone attending Stanford comes from a background of wealth and privilege, obviously, but few people arrive there after circumstances like my spouse’s.

Violent trauma; abandonment; food insecurity. For college, she’d turned down Harvard despite their generous offer of significant financial aid: she didn’t have any money to pay for college. Instead, she went to a school that offered a full ride plus a stipend.

Even that wasn’t enough: her father took out credit cards in her name and used them to pay his bills. After collection notices began to arrive at her dormitory mail room, she … well, first she slumped to the floor and cried. Wouldn’t you? But then she used the money from her job at the college bookstore to pay them off.

After college, she won a Fulbright. The Fulbright award comes with a stipend: many young people use this money to travel, to see something of the world while they’re overseas. My spouse used the stipend to pay her bills from dental surgery.

By the time she and I met, she’d made her way to Stanford; her mother, father, and younger sibling were all unhoused.

Her father was in Albany. Luckily, a friend took him in, a man named Paul who had a little pension from working at the post office. Paul’s house was small, the foundation was sinking, and everything rattled with the passing trains, but there were four walls and heat. I’ve never not had four walls and heat. I like to think that I have a good imagination, but I can’t fathom being unhoused in Albany.

The post office pension was something, but Paul decided that he ought to grow marijuana. That would nicely supplement his income. He also decided, despite living on a street where two-thirds of the houses were vacant and boarded up, that he ought to tell his neighbors about this plan to grow marijuana in the attic. Then they’d know to buy from him.

The first time people broke in to steal the marijuana, my spouse’s father got pistol whipped in the face. For weeks afterward, his face ached. After the second time, he found his bedraggled tomato plants abandoned in the middle of the street. This I can imagine: somebody waiting in the car, engine idling, ready to drive away, looking up to say “You idiots, that’s not marijuana!”

Paul decided to get a guard dog. He found somebody with a pitbull too unruly to handle – the dog had been kicked out of two houses already, for howling, breaking things, biting people. This dog would go berserk around bright lights, and was even worse when he heard the sound of motorcycles. Two years old, but he walked and ran with a limp; the dog must’ve broken a leg when he was a puppy.

Having a guard dog helped. When some guys were working their way down the street, stripping copper pipes out of all the vacant houses, the dog started barking and got the guys arrested. My spouse’s father didn’t get pistol-whipped again.

He talked to my spouse on the phone. “Paul got a dog,” he said.

My spouse knew how much her father loved animals. “Is this really your dog?” she asked.

“No,” her father said, “it’s Paul’s dog.” But also, my spouse could hear a gentle panting; the dog’s head was in her father’s lap.

The next year, toward the end of November, Paul was having sex and died. Very suddenly. Which must have been traumatizing for Paul’s lady friend?

After Paul passed, the dog was very clearly my spouse’s father’s dog.

Unfortunately, the mortgage was in Paul’s name. As were the utilities. Paul’s post office pension had been paying the bills. Which meant that my spouse’s father and the dog were squatting in the vacant house without electricity or heat. December tends to be cold in Albany.

So my spouse and I borrowed a car – we’d spent a few years walking and biking everywhere – and drove out to get her father and the dog. We moved them in with us, thinking that they’d be with us briefly, then found out that you can’t keep a pitbull in Section 8 housing. So then we spent a few months searching for a second apartment that we could afford.

My spouse’s father didn’t have any money. He’d lost his last job – parking cars in a garage – when he had a stroke during working hours. His boss assumed that he’d been drinking and so he was thrown in jail instead of taken to the hospital. He had unmanaged diabetes and cardiovascular troubles and the stroke made things worse, but it took several years before he was approved for disability.

But the dog kept him alive. Got him outside a few times a day – the dog would pull like a little tugboat to get my spouse’s father up the stairs again to their apartment – and would rouse him when my spouse’s father briefly stopped breathing in his sleep. (Which happened often, and always sounded deeply unsettling during the time that he lived with my spouse and me.) The dog seemed to like trying to help. Although, honestly, the dog was pretty traumatized too: he’d howl when he was left alone, and the gunshot sounds of the 4^th of July would make him thrash and snap his jaws.

The dog got his full name a few years later, when my spouse showed up at her father’s apartment to tell him she was pregnant.

“Max,” her father said, turning toward the dog with tears brimming in his eyes, “you’re gonna be an uncle. Uncle Max.”

“Nuh uh,” my spouse said, “we are not calling the dog Uncle Max.”

My spouse’s father died when our child was one. The dog came to live with us: his fifth family, then. We called him Uncle Max.

The name helped. He was a sixty-pound, scary-looking pitbull. But there’s something disarming about a dog called “uncle.”

The first week he lived with us, I thought he’d bitten off my child’s fingers. I was fixing lunch and had lost track of what my child was doing. I didn’t realize that she might be in the room with the scary dog.

Suddenly, I heard my child wail. I rushed toward the sound, and my child came staggering toward me, clutching her arm against her belly as though her hand might be bleeding or even missing, but when she finally let me see, there was the slightest little dimple on the soft skin of the back of her hand. She tried to explain what had happened to me in that vaguely incomprehensible way that an 18-month-old explains things:

“I, I …” she said, or perhaps “Eye, eye …” and then, “…put finger Max-y eye.”

So she’d been putting her fingers into the dog’s eyeball and then wailed, chagrined, when he had rather gently told her “No.”

Uncle Max loved running. I rather loathed going running with him, but we went together three times each week. He was fast, despite his limp, and he liked to start at a sprint, bolting from the house with me stumbling along behind him, struggling to hang on to his leash. Then, after about three miles he’d tire and plod along the rest of the way home.

He especially loved bounding through the local university campus, drawing smiles from students as his tongue flopped rakishly through the air: he was as gorgeous and charismatic as an underwear model. When people were watching, he liked to hop up and prance along little stone walls next to the sidewalk. He’d wag his tail and flirt whenever people asked to pet him.

But Uncle Max had memories. He held a lifelong vendetta. He’d seen an ambulance take my spouse’s father away, and then my spouse’s father never came back: just a long lock of faded russet hair that my spouse brought for Uncle Max to sniff.

I was walking Uncle Max one day when an ambulance came by us, forty miles per hour and flashing lights on a quiet street. Uncle Max lunged, trying to bite the ambulance, and nearly pulled me off my feet.

To be perfectly honest, my eyes filled up with tears when I typed this. Uncle Max seemed mostly happy. But that was one goal he never achieved: he never got his revenge, never killed an ambulance.

That’s one type of heroism. Easy to spot. Cinematic. A dog hurling himself into danger to slay the mechanical beast that took his person.

Uncle Max also had the other kind. The quiet heroism. Generally I don’t like David Foster Wallace’s writing, but I love this passage about heroism from The Pale King:

“By which,” [our accounting instructor] said, “I mean true heroism, not heroism as you might know it from films or the tales of childhood. You are now nearly at childhood’s end; you are ready for the truth’s weight, to bear it. The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all – all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. An audience.”

He made a gesture I can’t describe: “Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth – actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.”

He paused again and smiled in a way that was not one bit self-mocking. “True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care – with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk.”

This is a sad passage: the author wants to convey the heroism of quietly getting your work done; his own ability to do so had faltered. David Foster Wallace could no longer bear to sit at his desk.

But Uncle Max had children to look after. I think that Uncle Max was in a lot of pain for his last few years. He lived until he was almost fourteen, but by the time he was eight, he stopped being able to run – he still wanted to run, but if we let him, he’d spend the next few days licking his aching, arthritic joints – and as the years went on, he needed to take progressively shorter and shorter walks. Near the end of his life, he was so stiff in the mornings that watching him walk was like a stop-motion film of a taxidermied dead animal.

But each day, after his medication kicked in, he was so happy to see his kids, to play with them or simply sit and be their pillow. He hurt, a lot, but he probably would have kept on going if we’d asked him.

At times, of course, he was infuriating. He felt aggrieved one evening when we rushed off to a dinner party without taking him; he protested by nosing his way into our baking supplies, dragging a package of chocolate chips off a shelf, and devouring them. His heart was racing and his breath was shallow as I drove him to the all-night vet; it took a while to clean all his chocolate-scented vomit.

He’d shriek with a high-pitched, plangent whine whenever he felt like he wasn’t near enough to help; other people in town can walk their dogs to playgrounds and leave them tied just outside the fence, but Uncle Max had lost so many families that he couldn’t believe we’d survive without him. His shrieks sounded like he was in agony; spiritually, perhaps he was.

And he was very loud. Our whole neighborhood knew when he was demanding to go outside or in. Once when we happened to be out of the house for a while on the 4^th of July, we returned home to find the kid next door shaking her head ruefully and saying, “I think there’s something wrong with your dog.” He never could handle fireworks.

But he loved his children.

Uncle Max did well. I believe he lived his life with heroism.

I’m proud of that dog.

And I’m proud of my spouse. She took care of her father until the end and then some. For seven years after her father died, my spouse made sure that his dog was safe & warm, well-fed & loved.

Most paths that start like theirs do not lead to here.

On maternal bonds and cruelty.

When I was a child, my parents gave me a toy walrus to sleep with. While cuddling this walrus, I’d twist my fingers through a small looped tag on its back, until one day I knotted the tag so thoroughly that I cut off my circulation. I screamed; my finger turned blue; my parents rushed in and wanted to cut off the tag.

“No!” I apparently screamed. “The soft tag is the best part!”

I continued to refuse their help until they offered a compromise, merely slicing the loop in half so we could save my throbbing finger and prevent any future calamity.

I continued to sleep with that toy walrus until I was midway through high school. As I fell asleep, my parents would sometimes peer inside my bedroom and see me lying there, eyes closed, breath slow, my fingers gently stroking that soft tag.

Yes, kids with autism are sometimes quite particular about sensory stimulation. But I am not alone! Baby monkeys also love soft fabric.

So do their mothers.

After biologist Margaret Livingstone published a research essay, “Triggers for Mother Love,” animal welfare activists and many other scientists were appalled. In the essay, Livingstone casually discusses traumatic ongoing experiments in which hours-old baby monkeys are removed from their mothers. The babies are then raised in environments where they never glimpse anything that resembles a face, either because they’re kept in solitary confinement and fed by masked technicians or because the babies’ eyes are sutured shut.

After the babies are removed from their mothers, Livingstone offers the mothers soft toys. And the mothers appear to bond with these soft toys. When one particular baby was returned to its mother several hours later, Livingstone writes that:

“The mother looked back and forth between the toy she was holding and the wiggling, squeaking infant, and eventually moved to the back of her enclosure with the toy, leaving the lively infant on the shelf.”

Although I dislike this ongoing research, and don’t believe that it should continue, I find Livingstone’s essay to be generally compassionate.

Livingstone discusses parenting advice from the early twentieth century – too much touch or physical affection will make your child weak! – that probably stunted the emotional development of large numbers of children. Livingstone expresses gratitude that the 1950s-era research of Harry Harlow – the first scientist to explore using soft toys to replace a severed maternal bond – revealed how toxic these recommendations really were.

Harlow’s research may have improved the lives of many human children.

Harlow’s research intentionally inflicted severe trauma on research animals.

To show that the aftereffects of trauma can linger throughout an animal’s life, Harlow used devices that he named “The Rape Rack” and “The Pit of Despair” to harm monkeys (whom he did not name).

Harlow did not justify these acts by denigrating the animals. Indeed, in Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals, research-scientist-turned-animal-activist John Gluck describes working with Harlow as both a student and then professorial collaborator, and believes that Harlow was notable at the time for his respect for monkeys. But this was not enough. Gluck writes that:

“The accepted all-encompassing single ethical principle was simple: if considerations of risk and significant harm blocked the use of human subjects, using animals as experimental surrogates was automatically justified.”

“Harlow showed that monkeys could be emotionally destroyed when opportunities for maternal and peer attachment were withheld. He argued that affectionate relationships in monkeys were worthy of terms like love.”

“In his work on learning in monkeys … [he offered] abundant evidence that monkeys develop and evaluate hypotheses during attempts to develop a solution.”

“Everything that Harlow learned from his research declared that monkeys are self-conscious, emotionally complex, intentional, and capable of substantial levels of suffering.”

For my own scientific research, I purchased cow’s brains from slaughterhouses. I used antibodies that were made in the bodies of rabbits and mice who lived (poorly) inside industrial facilities. For my spouse’s scientific research, she killed male frogs to take their sperm.

We’re both vegan.

I’d like to believe that we’d find alternative ways to address those same research questions if we were to repeat those projects today. But that’s hypothetical – at the time, we used animals.

And I certainly believe that there are other ways for Livingstone to study, for instance, the developmental ramifications of autistic children rarely making eye contact with the people around them – without blinding baby monkeys. I believe that Livingstone could study the physiological cues for bonding without removing mothers’ babies (especially since Harlow’s work, from the better part of a century ago, already showed how damaging this methodology would be).

Personally, I don’t think the potential gains from these experiments are worth their moral costs.

But also I recognize that, as a person living in the modern world, I’ve benefited from Harlow’s research. I’ve benefited from the research using mice, hamsters, and monkeys that led to the Covid-19 vaccines. I’ve benefited from innumerable experiments that caused harm.

Livingstone’s particular research might not result in any benefits – a lot of scientific research doesn’t – but unfortunately we can’t know in advance what knowledge will be useful and won’t won’t.

And if there’s any benefit, then I will benefit from this, too. It’s very hard to avoid being helped by knowledge that’s out there in the world.

To my mind, this means I have to atone – to find ways to compensate for some of the suffering that’s been afflicted on my behalf – but reparations are never perfect. And no one can force you to recognize a moral debt.

You will have to decide what any of this means to you.

On Long Covid, minds, and bodies.

After “recovering” from Covid-19, many people have suffered lingering malaise: labored breathing, foggy thoughts, chronic fatigue.

It’s awful, and it’s ill-understood. Trials are ongoing to try to help people, but, honestly, medical doctors don’t know what to do. Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale, has been investigating Long Covid since late 2020 and has a long list of experimental therapies that her team would like to test.

In an interview with Jennifer Couzin-Frankel for Science magazine, Iwasaki said “As a basic scientist, of course I’d like to have all the pieces of the puzzle” before giving people untested therapies, “but the patients, they cannot wait.”

Unfortunately, longstanding prejudice in the medical community about what counts as a “real” disease has meant that a promising medication, Prazosin, apparently isn’t even on the list of therapies to try.

Full recovery from an upper respiratory infection like influenza or Covid-19 often takes months. This timeline is very noticeable among athletes, whose performance is exquisitely sensitive to any disturbances in breathing. Even though young people recover from many illnesses much more quickly than others, an elite high school athlete who catches a bad respiratory infection will often suffer for an entire sports season.

This is after the acute phase of coughing and viral production has passed: bodies can take a long time to heal.

Diabetes, heart damage, and a wide range of autoimmune conditions can also be triggered by viral infections (or, often, a body’s immune response to viral infection). Even after a virus has been cleared from a person’s body, the collateral damage caused by the infection or the person’s immune response can result in lingering maladies.

We shouldn’t be surprised that a wide range of persistent problems would appear after the vast majority of the world’s population just had their first encounter (and second, and third …) with a novel coronavirus.

Also, common symptoms of Long Covid – sleep disturbances, muddled thoughts, chronic fatigue, unexpectedly low cortisol, “odd” immune responses, gastrointestinal distress – match common symptoms of PTSD. For many people, Long Covid probably is PTSD.

Please note that I’m not saying that Long Covid isn’t real!

PTSD is real. PTSD causes real physical effects. But for some reason – perhaps because PTSD has a partly psychological origin – PTSD is often considered a less meaningful condition by both the professional medical community and our society at large.

In an opinion essay for the New York Times – “If You’re Suffering After Being Sick with Covid, It’s Not Just in Your Head” – sociologist Zeynep Tufekci inadvertently perpetuates this prejudice, the idea that conditions that have mental causes aren’t as important. I don’t believe that this was Tufekci’s intent – after all, she does an excellent job listing many conditions that the medical community incorrectly discounted in the past.

But conditions that target the brain matter, too! Honestly, it shouldn’t be a hard sell to convince people that brains are at least as important to the human experience as kidneys, lungs, livers, or arteries.

And yet, here we are, living in a world where migraines, depression, or PTSD are considered less “real” than other conditions.

Most likely, what we’ve been calling Long Covid will turn out to be a variety of different conditions. Some people have suffered inflammation or damage to their hearts or lungs that will last a long while after viral clearance. Some people are experiencing the opportunistic reactivation of other latent viruses.

But many cases of Long Covid are probably PTSD. Which is a real condition, with real physiological effects, and there are real medications – like the blood pressure medication Prazosin – that can help in recovery.

We shouldn’t let prejudice about which conditions count keep people from the treatments they need.

On trauma and the marshmallow test.

We were walking our dogs past our neighbor Katie’s house when she stepped onto her front porch. Katie is a philosophy professor specializing in the works of David Hume. She is also a phenomenal baker of holiday treats (her collection of cookie cutters is prodigious) and a generous guardian to several cats.

“Your flowers look beautiful!” we called out from about twenty-five feet away.

“I hope they don’t die right away,” she said. Then she shook her head and laughed. “God, what a year. They do look beautiful. And that’s the first thing I thought?”

We’re feeling traumatized. Nearly all of us.

The marshmallow test: a researcher leaves a young child in a room with a marshmallow. “You can eat it now, but I’ll be back in ten minutes, and if the marshmallow is still there, you’ll get to have two.”

The marshmallow test has been written about extensively. The children who waited used a variety of strategies to distract themselves from temptation, like closing their eyes or singing to themselves.

Some children impulsively ate the marshmallow. Here’s a treat, nom nom nom! But the children who waited, the researchers reported, grew up to be more successful.

A variety of claims were made, like that the willpower needed to delay gratification allowed children to prioritize their futures, to keep struggling and striving even when things were hard, to turn down drugs and alcohol.

Here’s another interpretation: children who have been through trauma might be making a perfectly logical decision if they eat the marshmallow right away. Because lots of kids have been taught, by past experience, that despite a recently met grown-up’s promise, waiting might cause them to get zero marshmallows, not two.

If a child has learned that any situation might suddenly turn dangerous, they might not feel safe closing their eyes to ignore the marshmallow. If a child has learned that the money and food often run out by the end of the month, they might rightfully eat treats when there’s still a chance.

The pandemic has made me more impulsive. Like my neighbor Katie, I worry that the beautiful flowers might die –almost to the point of forgetting to enjoy them while they last.

Like a child, I worry that the marshmallow might be gone.

I am – or at least, I have been for almost my entire life – a patient, resilient person. My graduate degree took six years. I merrily undertook a writing project that lasted another six. I’m raising children, which feels both hectic and achingly slow.

But right now, I can feel it in myself. Signing up for a vaccine and having the appointment be two and a half weeks away! felt interminable. Every delay aches. The future feels like a distant blur.

Especially amid all the outbreaks of violence – mass shootings in the national news, seemingly unrelated spates of murders in our local paper, all of them likely rooted in impulsiveness, isolation, & stress – delaying any source of joy feels agonizing. As though we might not make it another whole week, or month, or year.

Today, at least, I set aside time in the morning for self-care. I dropped the kids off at school. I went for a fast run, five kilometers just under eighteen minutes. I stretched.

Most importantly, I took the time to meditate.

Meditation is the marshmallow test writ small.

Set a timer for twenty minutes. Sit down. Close your eyes. Choose some small phrase, meaningful or not – “sat nam,” “love more,” “I am calm” – and intone it silently in your mind, half as you breathe in, half as you breathe out. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Your mind might wander – if you notice, try to resume your small phrase. Silently repeated sound can anchor you, give yourself space to wash away some mental turmoil.

And, if you are like me, you’ll want to open your eyes and be done with it. This is taking forever! See if you can stay. Keep your eyes closed. Repeat your phrase, and breathe.

If you can last the entire time – well, no researcher will bring you a second marshmallow. But you’ll still receive a gift. A bit of inner peace that wasn’t there before.

I could not have passed the marshmallow test yesterday.

I meditated.

I could probably pass today.

header image by Kate Ter Haar on flickr

On hostage situations and jail.

My family recently visited a state park for some hiking. I know that we are quite privileged to be able to do it, but visiting nature is really restorative right now.

At the end of the day, we sat near a firepit and roasted vegan marshmallows.

After a few minutes, a woman and her partner asked if they could join us. They sat on the other side of the fire, and we got to talking.

The woman used to work in special education, but now she teaches geography and world religions. She loves her work, because she helps students in her small Midwestern town realize how much possibility there is in our world.

Her partner works for the Department of Corrections as a hostage negotiator.

“In training, you feel like you’re doing the same things over and over. Like, hasn’t there been enough of this already? But then, when you have to use it, you hardly have to think about it, you know just what to do. All that repetition really pays off.”

A few months earlier, several of the guys in our jail poetry class were talking about the drills they’ve been in.

“It was the scariest thing of my entire life. I knew it was just a drill, too. It was fucking terrifying. All these SWAT guys running in, screaming, they’ve got paintball guns, Get on the ground!, yelling, If you fucking move your ass is grass!”

“You’re lying there, face on the ground, can’t move, they might ziptie your hands behind your back, you can’t move for hours. I mean, I was lying there, just watching this puddle of piss spreading from the guy next to me. I fucking hated that guy right then. But he tried to hold it, I know he did. They had us lying there so long.”

“You tell a guard, I have to piss, he’s going to say, too fucking bad.”

“You’re lying there smelling shit, because you know some guy shit himself.”

“You’re smelling shit like right away. They come in yelling like that, some guys shit themselves from fear.”

“I know! I’m that guy. I was so fucking scared.”

“Your on the ground, lying on your stomach on the ground, I mean, the ground is gross, right? You’re lying there with your face on the floor and your neck hurts and you want to like turn your neck, but you got this guy yelling, You so much as fucking move, your ass is grass. Like, it’s pathetic, but it hurts.”

“Walked through this indoor rec later, paintball splatters all over the place. Like, fuck, what happened in here? Some guy in there, they must’ve lit him up.”

“I been through some rough shit in prison, but this one time, it was a piss-ant county jail, I was in the drill there. That was the worst. Like, there were only fifty guys in that place, what’s the big deal? But they came in there, boom, they fucking pepper sprayed us. For a drill.”

“I’ve watched guys die. But that shit, that’s the most scared I’ve ever been.”

I asked one of the guys, Jason, if he’d write about it.

“That’s something people should read,” I told him.

He shook his head.

“I’m trying to write, like, uplifting stuff. Help guys get on a better track, do better than what I done. This stuff … I don’t know. I don’t even really like talking about it. I don’t want to think about it enough to write it down.”

Header image: cropped photograph of a Val Verde county (Texas) drill from the Laughlin Airforce Base. Most of the time, cameras aren’t allowed inside jails or prisons.

On the moon landing, and who benefits if you believe it was faked.

If you’re worried that you don’t feel enough stress and anxiety, there’s an easy chemical fix for that. Habitual methamphetamine use will instill intense paranoia.

In our poetry classes in jail, I’ve talked with a lot of guys who stayed up for days watching UFO shows on TV. A few were also stockpiling military grade weaponry. One man used strings and pulleys to link his shotgun’s trigger to a doorknob, ensuring that anyone who tried to enter the house would be rudely greeted.

They’ve dismantled dozens of computers and phones: sometimes out of suspicion, sometimes because there are valuable components. Although they were rarely organized enough to hawk the proceeds of their dissections.

Suffice it to say that, deprived of sleep and dosed with powerful stimulants, their brains became tumultuous places.

Which is why we spend so much time talking about conspiracy theories.

I’ve written several previous essays about conspiracy theories – that the Santa myth teaches people to doubt expertise (children learn that a cabal of adults really was conspiring to delude them); that oil company executives have been conspiring to destroy the world; that, for all the ways Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow probes at the undercurrents of truth beneath government conspiracy, the text blithely incorporates metaphors from a Disney-promulgated nature conspiracy.

But, with the fiftieth anniversary coming up, the men in my class have been talking more about whether the moon landing was faked.

There’s only so much I can say. After all, I, personally, have never been to the moon.

One of my colleagues from Stanford recently conducted molecular biology experiments on the International Space Station, but that’s only zero point one percent of the way to the moon … and she and I were never close enough for me to feel absolutely certain that she wouldn’t lie to me.

Visiting the moon does seem much easier than faking it, though. Our government has tried to keep a lot of secrets, over the years. Eventually, they were leaked.

But that line of reasoning is never going to sway somebody. The big leak might be coming soon.

Instead, the strategy that’s worked for me is to get people worried about another layer of conspiracy.

“Let’s just say, hypothetically,” I say, “that we did send people to the moon. Why would somebody want to convince you, now, that we didn’t?”

When NASA’s project was announced, a lot of people were upset. Civil rights activist Whitney Young said, “It will cost $35 billion to put two men on the moon. It would take $10 billion to lift every poor person in this country above the official poverty standard this year. Something is wrong somewhere.” (I learned about this and the following quote from Jill Lepore’s excellent review of several new books about the moon landing.)

During John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, he argued that we needed to do it anyway. Despite the challenge, despite the costs. “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.”

We did reach the moon. But, did we use that knowledge to benefit the rights and progress of all people? Not so much.

A lot of the guys in jail went to crummy schools. They grew up surrounded by violence and trauma. They didn’t eat enough as kids. They’ve never had good medical care. They’ve struggled to gain traction in their dealings with government bureaucracies … we’ve spent years underfunding post offices, schools, the IRS, the DMV, and, surprise, surprise!, find that it’s arduous interacting with these skeletal agencies.

To keep these men complacent, the people in power would rather have them believe that we didn’t visit the moon. “Eh, our government has never accomplished much, we faked that shit to hoodwink the Russians, no wonder this is a horrible place to live.”

The fact that people in power are maliciously undermining our country’s basic infrastructure would seem way worse if you realized that, 50 years ago, with comically slapdash technologies and computers more rudimentary than we now put into children’s toys, this same government sent people to the moon.

Ronald Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” And he was in a position to make his words true – he was the government, so all he had to do was be incompetent. And then people would hate the government even more, and become even more distrustful of anyone who claimed that good governance could improve the world.

Needless to say, 45 has taken strategic incompetence to a whole new stratosphere. Beyond the stories of corruption that pepper the news, there’s also the fact that many appointments were never made; there are agencies that, as of July 2019, still don’t have anybody running them. These agencies will perform worse.

If people knew how good our government used to be, they might revolt. Better they believe the moon landing was a sham, that the faked photographs are as good as anybody ever got.

On power and species.

At track practice, a pair of high school runners were arguing. Knowing that I’ve completed twenty-two years of schooling, they figured I could resolve their debate.

“Coach Brown, who would win in a fight, Superman or The Hulk?”

I stared at them blankly. I knew a bit about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which helps to understand The Hulk, but I’d never read a Superman comic. Superman didn’t sound like an interesting hero: he seemed too powerful. Even The Hulk is more interesting within the context of a complex campaign, when he might become enraged and wreck his own plans, than in a single fight.

I failed to provide an answer, and the kids went back to arguing. (“Superman could just turn back time to before The Hulk got enraged, then smash him!”)

And I resolved to read a Superman book, to shore up this gap in my education. Astounding, isn’t it, that Stanford would allow me to graduate without knowing anything about the paragon of the DC universe?

I chose Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman. And was pleasantly surprised – although Superman is indeed too powerful for the risk of danger to provide narrative tension, he’s still sad. He doesn’t get the recognition that he feels he’s due; his powers leave him feeling isolated and alone; during the 24-hours when his girlfriend becomes his equal due to a magic serum, she spends her time flirting with other heroes.

Doing great work can feel hollow if nobody appreciates it.

Midway through the series, Superman meets two other survivors from his native Krypton. He expects that they’ll congratulate him on how well he’s kept his adopted planet safe. Instead, they’re disgusted by his complacency.

Superman, in turn, feels disappointed by his brethren. Within the world of comic books, characters who view their powers as conferring a responsibility are heroes; those who think that power gives them the right to do whatever they want are villains.

Homo sapiens are not as intelligent as the new arrivals from Krypton. We are smaller, slower, and weaker. Our tools are less technologically advanced. If they chose to cull our kind, we could do nothing to resist.

I recently had the opportunity to read Luke Dittrich’s New York Times Magazine article on the Puerto Rican macaque colony that was traumatized by Hurricane Maria. (I’ve written previously about Dittrich’s investigation into the history of “Patient H.M.” and unethical behavior among MIT memory researchers.)

This particular colony of macaques has been studied closely for years. Researchers have voluminous observational data from both before and after the hurricane; they’ve stored many tissue samples as well. The hope is that this dataset could unveil the biochemical consequences of trauma, and elucidate traits that allow some people to weather trauma more effectively than others.

With clear insights into the specific pathways affected by trauma, we might even be able to develop drugs that would allow humans to stave off PTSD. Or cure it.

Macaques have long been used as subjects for medical research. We’ve developed several vaccines that prevent AIDS in macaques, but unfortunately the differences between SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) and HIV meant that some of these vaccines increased human susceptibility to the disease. Whoops.

An image attributed to the Primate Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and disseminated in 1992.

Macaques are highly intelligent, social animals with approximately 93% the same DNA sequences as us humans. For immunology research, they’re kept in wire cages. They can’t touch, don’t really get to move around. But that’s not so bad compared to the nightmarish psychological studies that have been conducted on macaques in the past. Dittrich’s article summarizes a few of Dr. Harry Harlow’s experiments. Harlow named several pieces of his research equipment, such as “The Pit of Despair,” a small box devoid of light or sound in which children could be trapped for months on end, or “The Rape Rack,” which shouldn’t be described.

“[Harlow] found that the females who had endured the trauma of both the Pit of Despair and the Rape Rack tended to become neglectful or even severely abusive mothers.”

We’ve conducted studies on humans who have been traumatized. By surveying hurricane survivors, we’ve found that many suffer from PTSD. But one drawback of these investigations, Dittrich writes, is that “the humans in these studies … almost never become experimental subjects until after the traumatic events in question, which makes it hard to gauge how the events actually changed them.”

“If a researcher interested in how trauma affects individuals or societies were to dream up an ideal natural laboratory, she might imagine a discrete landmass populated by a multigenerational community that has been extensively and meticulously studied for many decades before the traumatizing event. Even better, it would be a population to which researchers would have unfettered access – not only to their minds, but also to their bodies, and even their brains.”

We are to macaques as Superman is to us. We are stronger, smarter, technologically superior. We can fly into space; macaques have done so only at our whims.

In “St. Francis Visits the Research Macaques of Modern Science” by John-Michael Bloomquist, we eavesdrop on a conversation between the saint and Miss Able, the first primate to leave our planet. St. Francis asks about her experience of the voyage; she tells him “The Gods did not let me see anything, the damn cone didn’t have a window.”

The capsule and couch used by one of America’s first spacefarers, a rhesus monkey named Able, is displayed at the National Air and Space Museum. Able and a companion squirrel monkey named Miss Baker were placed inside a Jupiter missile nose cone and launched on a test flight in May 1959.

We are indeed like gods among macaques, but we have not elected to be heroes. Instead, we’ve ravaged their ancestral lands. We’ve wracked their children with twisted nightmares that they could not wake from.

Even the Puerto Rican macaque colony that Dittrich writes about – some individuals are permitted to live out their days in relative peace, but this is a breeding center. If you’re developing an HIV vaccine, your lab’s macaques will die; for a few thousand dollars each, this colony will furnish replacements. According to their website, they maintain “an available pool of rhesus macaques in optimal condition for research.”

We humans are like gods, but, unlike Superman, we’ve chosen to be villains.

On storytelling and social justice.

Recently, Dave Eggers joined four local panelists (Lindsey Badger, Michelle Brekke, Max Smith, and me) to discuss writing and incarceration, especially the role of storytelling as a force for social justice.

When I discuss poetry with people in jail, we often get sidetracked into conversations about outer space, pharmacology, neuroscience … as it happens, the latter is particularly relevant to any discussion of storytelling. Because your consciousness has evolved to create stories.

When you choose to do something, like picking up a pen, the first thing that happens is that, unconsciously, your brain will send signals toward your muscles. You will begin to act. Then, once you are already in motion, your consciousness will be informed of your decision. Thats when your brain generates a story to explain why you chose to pick up the pen.

First, we act, then we concoct a narrative.

A human consciousness will typically create a story explaining why we chose to do something even if it wasn’t really our choice. If a researcher sways someone’s action through the use of transcranial magnetic or direct current stimulation, most people will still offer up a coherent explanation explaining why they chose to act that way.

Personally, I think this sort of research into free will and mind control is fascinating. I could continue rattling off more facts. By reading this essay, you might learn something. But it probably wouldn’t change how you act. Knowledge doesn’t spur behavior, emotions do.

In Mama’s Last Hug, Frans de Waal writes that:

The Portuguese-American neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reported on a patient, Elliot, with ventromedial frontal lobe damage. While Elliott was articulate and intellectually sound, witty even, he had become emotionally flat, showing no hint of affect in many hours of conversation.

Elliott was never sad, impatient, angry, or frustrated. This lack of emotion seemed to paralyze his decision making. It might take him all afternoon to make up his mind about where and what to eat, or half an hour to decide on an appointment or the color of his pen.

Damasio and his team tested Elliott in all sorts of ways. Even though his reasoning capacities seemed perfectly fine, he had trouble sticking with a task and especially reaching a conclusion. As Damasio summarized: “The defect appeared to set in at the late stages of reasoning, close to or at the point at which choice making or response selection must occur.”

Elliott himself, after a session in which he had carefully reviewed all options, said “And after all this, I still wouldn’t know what to do!”

After all, there is no way to prove, mathematically, how to be good. Your intellect will invariably fall short. Only by trusting your emotions can you decide that one course of action is better than another.

And that is the value of stories.

Eggers, who devotes much of his time to teaching young people, says that you could provide them with huge quantities of information – about mass incarceration in the U.S., or how we mistreat undocumented workers, or Muslim Americans after 9 / 11 – and it wouldn’t change anything. “But,” Eggers said, “if you give them even a 15-page first-person narrative, they become activists.”

By way of example, my co-panelists discussed several local stories that could be presented in a variety of ways. For instance, the kid who recently died in our local jail because the jailors stopped providing his medication after his eighteenth birthday. I’ve written about his ordeal previously; Max Smith had become close friends with him while they were confined in a small cell together; Lindsey Badger met with his mother after he died to preserve stories about his life that depict him more accurately than the terse denunciation he received from our local newspaper.

Michelle Brekke added that, although she hadn’t read the article about this young man, she knows that when she was sentenced, “If you were to look me up online, on a database or whatever, you would see that I’m a drug addict, you would see that I’m an intravenous drug user, you would see that I’m a drug dealer, but today, and even then, that’s not who I am. I’m actually a very kind, loving, caring person, who has had a really crappy way of life shoved onto me, so that’s the way of life I chose to take. I’m an overcomer, and I’ve been able to overcome that.”

“Luckily I was on the inside when I got arrested because I’m sure that the things that were said on social media, there couldn’t have been anything good.”

During her time in prison, Brekke began to write, which allowed her to tell the whole truth. She refused to let other people dictate the narrative of her life. “To be able to tell your story, or to hear somebody else’s story, you get the beginning, the middle, and the now.”

The last prompt from the audience was, “I’m curious about each of the panelists’ perspectives on how writers can hurt readers in a way that’s inspiring for people to act.”

Smith and Brekke answered for the panel (perhaps you could argue that Eggers has already provided an answer in his books – by intermixing levity with pain you can create stories that are sufficiently fun that they’ll reach an audience, but still convey a spark of indignation that compels people to work to change the world. After two hundred pages of comic antics in The Parade, Eggers concludes with an incandescent flash of horror).

Smith said, “Unfortunately for many of the people who are incarcerated, just being true to their experience hurts readers. It’s a horrible, horrible experience that is hard to imagine if you haven’t been exposed to it.”

And Brekke added, “I would want a reader to feel my own hurt, through the writing. To not feel sorry for me, but to be able to feel the truth and the pain that I once felt.”

The written word does not accomplish much if a tale is too unpalatable to reach its audience, but when the sorrows come from a place a deep integrity, or when the hurt is leavened with a touch of humor, readers might trust an author enough to continue.

And I am grateful that so many deeply committed people are willing to share hard stories in a way we can appreciate. Because we’ll need the emotional wallop of powerful stories to compel us to change the world.

Featured image: Max ribbing me. From a recording of the panel created by Jeremy Hogan.

On attentiveness and names.

When a scientist first discovers a function for a gene, that scientist gets to name it. Sometimes these names seem reasonable enough: I worked with a hematologist who did a study to identify proteins involved in apoptosis, which means roughly “programmed cell death” or “cellular suicide,” and so each gene wound up named “Requiem 3”, “Requiem 4,” etc.

Fruit fly geneticists tend to give their discoveries more creative names than other scientists. There’s the gene “cheap date” – if a fruit fly is missing that gene, it will – ha ha – be unable to process ethanol and so quickly passes out. Another genetic mutation produced male flies that would court either males or females, and so this was known for over a decade as “fruity,” until another scientist decided that universal courtship could be less offensively described by the term “fruitless,” because clearly any mating-like activity that does not lead to progeny is a waste of time.

Yup, some gene names were bad. One person’s idea of a joke might seem to somebody else like a mean-spirited reference to the wider world’s power dynamics.

Other gene names were bad not out of malice, but because humor at the expense of a fruit fly doesn’t make as many people laugh when a human child is dying.

A gene that produces a somewhat spiky-shaped protein was named after Sonic Hedgehog. It seemed funny at the time! See? The protein is spiky, the video game character has spiky hair, and … get it? You get it, right?

Okay, so this Sonic Hedgehog protein doesn’t look all that much like Sonic the Hedgehog. But spend enough time staring at something like protein crystal structures and you’ll experience pareidolia, like seeing animal shapes in irregularly dappled plaster ceilings, or anthropomorphic gods amongst the twinklings of the stars.

Well, the Sonic Hedgehog protein establishes a concentration gradient that allows cells to recognize their spatial position in a developing body. If a human fetus comes to term despite having a mutation in the Sonic Hedgehog gene (genetic abnormalities will often result in a miscarriage, but not always), the resulting child will have severe brain defects.

And then a doctor has to explain, “Your baby is suffering because of a Sonic Hedgehog mutation.”

And so, in 2006, geneticists capitulated to medical doctors. No more fanciful names for genes that might lie at the root of human health problems … which, because humans and fruit flies are actually pretty similar, means most genes. Patients would now be told about a mutation in the SHH gene instead of Sonic Hedgehog, or a mutation in the LFNG gene instead of Lunatic Fringe.

Words have power, after all.

Some people are more attentive to their environments than others. During evolutionary time, this trait was obviously good for humanity. If your tribe is traveling through a hostile environment, it helps to have somebody around who is paying attention to the world. A friend who’s primed to notice encroaching threats like a hungry lion about to leap out and attack. Maybe we should take a different path. Which, yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

Other people are particularly inattentive to their surroundings, so it’s easy for them to ignore the world and focus instead on one single problem. During evolutionary time, this trait was surely good for humanity, too. It’s helpful to have somebody on the lookout for threats that might eat you, obviously. But it’s also helpful to have somebody who might discover a way of using dried grass to weave baskets. A way of cooking mud into pottery that could carry or store water.

Neurodiversity is a virtue in and of itself. Over the millennia, the world has offered our species many challenges. Populations that were sufficiently diverse that some members were good at each of a variety of tasks were most likely to flourish. A cooperative species like termites or Homo sapiens benefits from specialization among its members.

Left to our their own devices, people would naturally fall asleep and wake up at different times. Some brains are primed to work best in the early morning; others work best late at night. And that’s good. It reduces the amount of time that a tribe would be susceptible to attack, everyone asleep.

But in the modern world, we occasionally forget to feel grateful for the diversity that allowed our species to thrive. The high school students whose brains are primed for late-night thinking drag themselves through morning classes like zombies. They’ll be midway through first period before the sun rises. Their teachers glance derisively at their slumped and scruffy forms and call them lazy.

Eventually, humans invented language. Much later, we invented writing. Much, much later, we invented the printing press, and then written words became so widely accessible that most humans could benefit from learning how to read.

Of course, reading is easier for people who are inattentive to their environment.

If I had been born earlier in human evolution, I totally would have been lion bait. When I’m reading a book, or am deep in thought, the rest of the world melts away. When I’m typing at home, K or the kids sometimes shout my name several times before I even realize that I’m being spoken to.

People like me, or this kid at a library, totally would’ve been lion bait.

Luckily for me, I wasn’t born way back then. Instead I was born into a world where inattentive people – the people best able to block out the world and instead focus on their own thoughts – are the most likely to find academic success. People like me become medical doctors. Then we get to name the world’s various conditions and maladies.

And so, when it came time to categorize the sort of person who is especially attentive to the world, people like me (who obviously thought that our way of being is the best way to be) referred to those others as having an attention deficit disorder.

Identifying those people’s awareness of their environs might sound like a virtue; instead, we castigated those people’s difficulty at ignoring the world.

I’ve never read the Percy Jackson books, but I’m glad that they exist, if only for passages like this (from The Lightning Thief):

“And the ADHD – you’re impulsive, can’t sit still in the classroom. That’s your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they’d keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that’s because you see too much, Percy, not too little.”

Childhood trauma can cause symptoms that medical doctors term “attention deficit disorder.” Which makes sense – if you’ve gone through an experience where your environs were threatening, you should learn to be more aware of your environment. It should become more difficult to ignore a world that has proven itself to be dangerous.

Even for somebody with my type of brain, it’s going to be easier to sit outside and read a book when there’s a squirrel nearby than if there’s a prowling grizzly fifteen meters away.

Some children have to learn early on that daddy’s sometimes a grizzly. And if it can happen to him, why not other grown-ups, too? Best to stay on high alert around the teacher. She’s trying to get you absorbed in these number tables … but what if that’s a trap?

Certain drugs can narrow a person’s perception of the world. They act like blinders, chemicals like nicotine, ritalin, and amphetamines, both un-methylated (sold under the trade name Adderall) and methylated (a CH3 group attached to the amine moiety of Adderall will slow its degradation by CYP2D6 enzymes in the liver, increasing the duration of its effects).

Note to non-chemists: the methylated analogue of Adderall goes by several names, including “ice,” “shard,” and “crystal meth.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it — this compound played a key role in the television show Breaking Bad. And it’s very similar to the stuff prescribed to eight year olds. Feel free to glance at the chemical structures, below.

In poetry class last week, a man who has cycled in and out of jail several times during the few years I’ve taught there – who I’d said “hello” to on the outside just a few weeks earlier when he rode his bicycle past the high school runners and me – plonked himself down in the squeaky plastic hair next to mine.

I groaned.

“I know, I know,” he said. “But I might be out on Monday.”

“What happened?”

“Failed a urine screen. But I was doing good. Out for six months, and they were screening me like all the time, I only failed three of them.”

“With … ?”

“Meth,” he said, nodding. “But I wasn’t hitting it bad, this time. I know I look like I lost some weight, dropped from 230 down to 205, but that’s just cause it was hard getting enough to eat. Wasn’t like last time. I don’t know if you remember, like, just how gaunt my whole face looked when they brought me in. But, man, it’s just … as soon as I step outside this place, my anxiety shoots through the roof … “

This is apparently a common phenomenon. When we incarcerate people, we carve away so much of their experience of the world. Inside the jail, there is a set routine. Somebody is often barking orders, telling people exactly what to do. There aren’t even many colors to be distracted by, just the white-painted concrete walls, the faded orange of inmate scrubs, the dull tan CO shirts and dark brown pants.

The world in there is bleak, which means there are very few choices to make. Will you sit and try to listen to the TV? (The screen is visible from three or four of the twelve cells, but not from the others.) Try, against all odds, to read a book? Or add your shouting voice to the din, trying to have a conversation (there’s no weather, so instead the fall-back topic is speculating what’s going to be served for dinner)?

After spending time locked up, a person’s ability to navigate the wider world atrophies, the same as your leg would if you spent months with it bundled up in a cast.

And these are people whom we should be helping to learn how to navigate the world better.

“ … so I vape a lot, outside. I step out of this place, that’s the first thing I do, suck down a cigarette. And, every now and then … “

He feels physically pained, being so attentive to his surroundings. And so he doses himself with chemicals that let him ignore the world as well as I can.

And, yes. He grew up with an abusive stepfather. This led to his acting squirrelly in school. And so, at ten years old, medical doctors began dosing him with powerful stimulants.

Meanwhile, our man dutifully internalized the thought that he had a personal failing. The doctors referred to his hyper-vigilance as an attention deficit disorder.

Words have power.

We can’t know now, after all the hurt we’ve piled on him, but think: where might our man be if he’d learned to think of his attentiveness as a virtue?

On reading poems from Donika Kelly’s ‘Bestiary’ in jail.

This post briefly touches on sexual assault and child abuse.

Many of the men in jail have struggled with interpersonal relationships.

After reading Bruce Weigl’s “The Impossible,” a poem about being sexually assaulted as a child, somebody stayed after class to ask if there were resources to help somebody recover from that sort of experience. The next week, he brought a two-page account of his own abuse.

After reading Ai’s “Child Beater,” many men proffered their own horror stories. Sometimes they offered excuses for their parents: “My mom, she had me when she was thirteen, I guess what you’d call it now would be ‘statutory rape.’ So she didn’t know what to do with us. But there were plenty of times, I’d be mouthing off, she’d tie my arms to rafters in the basement with an extension cord, and … “

Seriously, you don’t need to hear the rest of that story. Nor the conversation (we’ve read “Child Beater” about once a year) when the men discussed which objects they’d been hit with. They appraised concussions and trauma with the nuance of oenophiles.

Consider this gorgeous poem by Mouse:

THAT CAT

– Mouse

We had this cat

Small gray and frantic

Always knocking over my mother’s lamps

Me and my sister can’t sit on my mother’s furniture

But that cat can

My mother would whoop my ass for her lamps

Knocked over and broken

One day my mom bought me a dollar sign belt

Made of leather and metal

I put that belt to use every time I

Got my own ass whooped

We humans evolved to hunt. By nature, we are a rather violent species. But these cycles – people’s crummy childhoods; institutional violence during schooling and incarceration – amplify aggression. Our world “nurtures” many into malice.

If you ask people in jail why they’re in, almost everybody will say that they were busted for drugs or alcohol. But if you look at bookings, or hear from somebody what sort of case he’s fighting, about half the time it’s domestic violence.

So we’ve been reading poems from Donika Kelly’s Bestiary, a charming volume that uses abundant animal imagery to elucidate human relationships. The men need a safe space to discuss love and romance. Obviously, a dingy classroom inside a jail is not the ideal place, but this is what we’ve got.

Kelly’s “Bower” opens with:

Consider the bowerbird and his obsession

of blue, …

… then catalogs some of the strange objects that a male bowerbird might use to construct his pleasure dome. They are artists, meticulously arraying flowers, berries, beetles, even colorful bits of plastic, striving to create an arch sufficiently beautiful that a visiting female will feel inclined to mate.

Among tropical birds with female mate choice, most males will remain celibate. They try to woo each visitor, but fail. Usually one single male – he of the most impressive aerial gymnastics (among manakins) or he of the most impressive bower – will be chosen by every female in an area. Because the males don’t actually raise their young (their contribution ends after the ten or twenty seconds needed to copulate), any given male will have more than enough time for everyone who wants him.

Every male bowerbird devotes his life to the craft, but most of their creations will be deemed insufficiently beautiful.

… And

how the female finds him,

lacking. All that blue for nothing.

I love the irony of this ending. This bird’s bower has failed. The bits of blue that he collected were not sufficient to rouse anyone’s interest in him as a mate.

But life will generally seem pointless if we focus only on goals. Most bowerbirds won’t mate; Sisyphus will never get that boulder up; you and I will die. This poem is heartbreaking unless we imagine that the bowerbird takes some pleasure in the very act of creation.

(The natural world is not known for its kindness, but in this case it probably is – because every male bowerbird feels compelled to build these structures, it’s likely that their artistic endeavors feed their brains with dopamine.)

Indeed, most poems that we humans write will go unread. Even for published poets, it’s probably rare that their words woo a future mate. But even if Kelly’s own creation did not bring her love (and, based on what little I know about the publishing industry, it almost certainly did not bring her great fortune), it’s clear that all that effort was not for naught.

She made something beautiful. Sometimes, that alone has to be enough.

At another class, we read Kelly’s “What Gay Porn Has Done for Me.”

Thanks to the internet, many people learn about sexuality from pornography. One flaw with this “education” is that even when the female actors mime pleasure, they do so while gazing outward.

Kelly writes:

Call it comfort, or truth, how they look,

not at the camera, as women do,

but at one another.

In generic heterosexual pornography, there is a distance. There is no “relationship” shown between the actors – they’re not even looking at one another. Instead, the female actor is expected to gaze at a camera, and the (likely male) consumer is gazing at a computer or telephone screen to make some simulacrum of eye contact.

Each body is a body on display,

and one I am meant to see and desire.

Generic heterosexual pornography seems to objectify the actors much more than gay pornography because the focus is on a performer’s body more than the romantic acts depicted. Because so much of this pornography is consumed by a homophobic audience, male bodies are depicted minimally – usually only a single organ within the frame – which prevents couples from being shown.

The pleasure offered isn’t quite voyeurism, pretending to watch another pair make love. It’s fantasy, the chance to imagine being the bearer of the male genitalia. But this fantasy, independent a fantasy of conversation and mutual seduction, makes others’ bodies seem a thing to be used, not a carriage for the partner’s personality.

… I am learning

what to do with my face,

and I come on anything I like.

To desire, and to be desired, need not be degrading for anyone involved. This is a hard lesson to square with the sort of “sex education” that I received in school, which was sufficiently Christian that sex was presented as both desirable and bad. If a person thinks that he or she is wicked for wanting, it’ll be hard to discuss what each person wants.

There’s no way to pretend “I’m a good person who just got carried away!” if you make a sober, premeditated, consensual decision to do something bad.

Of course, sexuality isn’t bad. But many people still posture as thought it is. When these people feel (totally natural!) desire, they’re forced to create dangerous situations that might excuse their subsequent behavior.

Which, because of those excuse-enabling contortions, often winds up being bad.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: trauma